Poor Driving

Earlier this week, I was driving and thoughtfully wondering why the car in front of me was driving so slowly? This continued for a while until I recognized how fancy their car was. I began to understand that because their car was new they were driving it unreasonably slow, miles behind the next car and slowing down years before the lights ever turned yellow. I recognized that they had a desire to protect their car but at the same time my mind started to wander. I started to think of those people I’d seen represented in old movies and TV shows where men would take a car from the past and remake it, clean it up, and make it run again, only to keep it locked up in their garages. When people would come by they would open their garage to show the beauty they had made, to talk about how much time and money they put into it, and how many miles it still had and would continue to have for the rest of their life. Meanwhile they never addressed the fact that cars were made to be driven. It was at this moment that I realized how so many of us are those people. Sure we may not have expensive or antique cars to show off or to protect from the public roads but we all have things that we care about so much that we’re tempted to never use or to keep hidden from the public eye.

These are things that like the car are meant to be used, meant to be outside and in the public/ for a purpose. Things that we actually want to use but that we’re so caught up in protecting that we keep them in glass coffins and end up memorializing what isn’t even dead. These things can be ideas, gifts, desires, or even love.

Ideas we have but that we instead keep solely in our minds, locked away by inaction and all they do is prove how ingenious our minds are. Gifts or talents meant to be in the public, that we instead keep locked away, only showing a select group of guests who we unlock that garage for, people who ask us when it’ll hit the road and we don’t have an answer. Desires to change the world, see the world, or whatever desires they may be that are meant to be lived out but like ideas are just kept as cool tokens of something that could happen but is kept as just a possibility. Love that we cherish so much, feelings that we keep so deep within us that we never tell the people around us even when we know they feel the same.

All of these things, like a car can easily be taken out of the garage. It’s not that hard to pull out of a drive way however what stopped those people from doing so was a fear of what could happen when that car hit the road. As opposed to having the desire to use it for it’s purpose they chose inaction because of what could happen to the car out there on the great big road. When I came to this understanding it made me think back to the car, still driving ridiculously slow in front of me and how keeping those cherished things in garages just leads to a life like poorly driven cars. In other words, it leads us a life of living not to the fullest because we’re so cautious of all the things that can go wrong.

I’m not sure if I’m just spinning around this topic and not making sense but what I am trying to say is that no matter how scary and risky life can be, life is still meant for living. A person who stays inside of their house from the moment they were born to the moment they die may be safe but have they lived? In the same way, dreams, ideas, gifts, talents, and love are a part of life and if you play it so safe and keep them bottled in, by the end you’ll look at your little glass coffin and realize that those things suffocated to death. I’m saying this to myself too because there are so many things I want to do, but if I never do them then I will walk around disappointed in something that was always in my control. So instead I choose act, to put my ideas, desires, gifts, talents, and so on out there in the world because although there is a risk, it is what they were made for.